Smyslov Quotes

WB: “We don’t consider many stupid things, we get rid of them fast … There was a great article in The New Yorker when the Fischer/Spassky chess matches were going on [in 1972]. It got into this speculation of whether humans would be able to take on computers in chess. They said, ‘How can the human mind, when all you’re really looking at is the results from various moves in the future, deal with a computer that’s thinking at unbelievable speeds?’ They examined the subject and found a Fischer or a Spassky, essentially, was eliminating 99.99% of the possibilities without even thinking about it. It wasn’t that they could outthink the computer in terms of speed, but they had this ability in what you might call grouping, or exclusion, where they just got right down to the few possibilities out of the zillions of possibilities that really had any chance of success. Getting rid of the nonsense—Charlie and I are pretty good at that. We can hang up fast.” CM: “There you have it. All you have to do is go at it in the way that Vasily Smyslov did when he was the world champion of chess.